Conditioned delivery of electronic mail

ABSTRACT

A system and method for conditioned distribution of e-mail is provided. Delivery of an e-mail message to selected second recipients (equivalently addressees) may be conditioned on a set of preselected conditions, in particular to a set of conditions associated with the delivery of the e-mail to a set of first recipients. In response to message delivery notifications corresponding to the set of first recipients, a determination is made if the delivery conditions are satisfied, and delivery to the set of second recipients made accordingly. Delivery to a set of third recipients may be likewise conditioned on another set of conditions.

TECHNICAL FIELD

The present invention relates in general to data processing systems, andin particular, for electronic mail client systems including mechanismsfor automatically controlling the delivery of e-mail to selectedrecipients based on criteria set by the sender.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Electronic mail (e-mail) processing in modern data processing systemsare typically based on a client/server model. An e-mail client, usuallydeployed on a user's workstation or personal computer receives userinput and generates an e-mail message which is typically transferred tothe server, generically referred to as a mail transfer agent (MTA). TheMTA then transfers the mail to one or more intermediate MTAs andultimately to an MTA corresponding to the recipient of the e-mailmessage (as determined by the e-mail address of the addressee). Transferof the e-mail message commonly uses the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol(SMTP).

In accordance with these e-mail protocols, a user may requestconfirmation of delivery of the e-mail to a recipient's mailbox, orconfirmation that the e-mail has been opened by the recipient. Typicallyan e-mail client allows a user to selectively enable these deliveryconfirmation options. However, there is no mechanism to customize thedelivery of e-mail.

In some circumstances, it may be desirable to control the distributionof an e-mail message to selected recipients. For example, the e-mailmessage may include sensitive information that should be distributed toand read by a particular set of recipients before being distributed morewidely. Consider, within an enterprise, the distribution of an e-mailannouncement concerning organizational changes within the enterprise. Itmay be desirable to distribute the announcement first to managers withinthe enterprise, then to employees affected by the changes and lastly toall employees. It may be further desired to delay distribution to one ormore of the categories of recipients based on the delivery status ofprior recipients.

As noted above, e-mail protocols provide for delivery confirmation,options to be selected by the user. However, there is a need in the artfor systems and methods for controlling the distribution of e-mail amongrecipients in response to user-specified conditions.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The aforementioned needs are addressed by the present invention.Accordingly, there is provided in one embodiment of the presentinvention a method for conditional delivery of e-mail. The methodincludes transmitting a first e-mail message to one or more firstaddressees. Message delivery notifications corresponding to a deliverystatus of said first e-mail message with respect to corresponding onesof said one or more addressees are received. In response to these, it isdetermined if a preselected set of conditions for delivery of saide-mail message to one or more second addressees is satisfied.

The foregoing has outlined rather generally the features and technicaladvantages of one or more embodiments of the present invention in orderthat the detailed description of the invention that follows may bebetter understood. Additional features and advantages of the inventionwill be described hereinafter which may form the subject of the claimsof the invention.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

For a more complete understanding of the present invention, and theadvantages thereof, reference is now made to the following descriptionstaken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which:

FIG. 1 illustrates an architecture for e-mail messaging which may beused in conjunction with the principles of the present invention;

FIG. 2 illustrates, in flowchart form, a methodology for controllingdistribution of e-mail among recipients; and

FIG. 3 illustrates, in block diagram form, a data processing systemwhich may be used in conjunction with the methodologies incorporatingthe present inventive principles.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

A mechanism for conditioned distribution of e-mail is provided. Deliveryof an e-mail message to selected second recipients (equivalentlyaddressees) may be conditioned on a set of preselected conditions, inparticular to a set of conditions associated with the delivery of thee-mail to a set of first recipients. In response to message deliverynotifications corresponding to the set of first recipients, adetermination is made if the delivery conditions are satisfied, anddelivery to the set of second recipients made accordingly. Delivery to aset of third recipients may be likewise conditioned on another set ofconditions.

In the following description, numerous specific details are set forthsuch to provide a thorough understanding of the present invention. Forexample, particular e-mail transport protocols may be referred to,however, it would be recognized by those of ordinary skill in the artthat the present invention may be practiced without such specificdetails, and in other instances, well-known circuits have been shown inblock diagram form in order not to obscure the present invention inunnecessary detail. Refer now to the drawings, wherein depicted elementsare not necessarily shown to scale and wherein like or similar elementsare designated by the same reference numeral through the several views.

FIG. 1 schematically illustrate e-mail exchange architecture which maybe used in conjunction with the present invention. The e-mail exchangearchitecture illustrated in FIG. 1 includes mail clients 102 a and 102b. A mail client typically provides the user interface to an e-mailexchange system. E-mail clients may be stand-alone applications such asEudora a well-known cross-platform e-mail client. Additionally, Unix andUnix-like platforms, such as Linux, provide e-mail clients such as Pineand Mutt. On Windows platforms, Microsoft Outlook includes an e-mailclient. Messages generated by the user for transmission, typically via anetwork, to the mail addressee are sent to a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA),typically using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). Thearchitecture of FIG. 1, two MTAs, 104 a and 104 b are illustrated. MTAsqueue e-mail messages for relay toward the destination. MTA 104 amaintains queue 106 a and MTA 104 b maintains queue 106 b. Additionally,as discussed in conjunction with FIG. 2 below, an MTA may queue e-mailthe delivery of which is conditioned, and whose delivery is pendingwhile the conditions remain unsatisfied. Mail is forwarded between MTAs,typically using the SMTP. Thus, an e-mail sent by a user of mail client102 a, for example, may generate an e-mail message addressed to the userof mail client 102 b, such message may be transferred first to MTA 104 awhich may queue the message in queue 106 a. The message may then beforwarded to MTA 104 b which provides the egress mail server for mailclient 102 b. It would be appreciated by those of ordinary skill in theart that the architecture of FIG. 1 is exemplary, and in particular, thetypical routing of an e-mail message may include the relay of themessage by more than two MTAs.

Mail clients, such as mail clients 102 a and 102 b, typically include amechanism to selectively enable the user to specify deliveryconfirmation options, referred to as Delivery Status Notification (DSN).Often this is selected via a graphical user interface (GUI) (not shown)as for example in Microsoft® Outlook, but could be specified by acommand or command keyword-value pair in a command-line interface (CLI),as in Pine. Additionally, RFC2298-compliant MUAs provide for optionallyreceiving a “read” notification, that may enable the return of anotification to the sender that the e-mail has been displayed on therecipients PC or workstation. (RFCs are Internet documents which areused to promulgate Internet standards; RFCs are available from theInternet Engineering Task Force (http://www.ietf.org).) RFC2298specifies an defines a MIME content-type that may be used by a MUA orelectronic mail gateway to report the disposition of a message after ithas been successfully delivered to a recipient. In particular, RFC2298provides specifications for an extensible message format for messagedelivery notifications (MDNs). A specification for DSNs is provided inRFC1894. (A DSN is requested in the SMTP transaction between thesender's e-mail client and the sender's MTA, in accordance with RFC1891,SMTP Service Extension for Delivery Status Notifications.) A DSN doesnot report on the disposition of an e-mail once it is delivered to therecipient's MUA, but only provides information on the success or failureof the delivery of the e-mail to the recipient's MUA. As noted above, anMDN may be requested for that purpose. Such notification mechanisms maybe used in conjunction with the controlled distribution of e-mail inaccordance with the principles of the present invention, as discussedbelow. These may be used by a conditional delivery system which may beincorporated in an MUA, such as conditional delivery system 110 a and110 b, in accordance with the present invention.

Refer now to FIG. 2 which illustrates, in flowchart form, a methodology200 for providing conditional distribution of e-mail in accordance withan embodiment of the present invention. Methodology 200 may be used by aconditional delivery module in an MUA, such as conditional deliverymodule 110 a, b FIG. 1.

Note that the flowcharts provided herein are not necessarily indicativeof the serialization of operations being performed in an embodiment ofthe present invention. Steps disclosed within these flowcharts may beperformed in parallel. The flowcharts are indicative of thoseconsiderations that may be performed to produce the operations availableto provide controlled distribution of e-mail based on user-specifiedcriteria. It is further noted that the order presented is illustrativeand does not necessarily imply that the steps must be performed in theorder shown.

User input specifying the delivery options and associated parametervalues associated therewith are received in step 204. Delivery optionsmay include a message priority and conditional delivery requirements.Present e-mail clients such as Outlook and Eudora provide for userselectable message priority set via a GUI based user input, an optionsdialog pane in Outlook and a popup list in Eudora. Such user interfacesmay be similarly employed to enter delivery options and parametersspecifying values for the conditional delivery of e-mail messages toparticular recipients or groups of recipients. Conditions may bespecified for each recipient or group of recipients. Such requirementsmay, for example, condition the delivery of a message to particularrecipients or groups of recipients on the receipt of the message byother recipients, receipt of the message by a specified number ofselected recipients or groups of recipients, or a specified fraction ofa number of selected recipients. Conditions may also be measured by anumber of messages opened by the selected recipients. Note that thepresent inventive principles may be applied to any set of conditionsthat may be associated with the delivery of e-mail to particularrecipients or groups of recipients.

In step 206, unconditioned e-mail are transmitted to the recipients(i.e. addressees) of these messages. Note that the e-mail sent in step206 may include a request for an MDN (in accordance with RFC2298, asnoted above) to acknowledge the display of the message. Additionally, aDelivery Status Notification (DSN) may be requested in accordance withRFC1891. Whether either or both is requested depends on the conditionaldelivery requirements. For example, if the conditions includerequirements with respect to the display of the message by therecipients of the e-mail sent in step 206, then an MDN may be requested.If the conditions include delivery requirements, then a DSN may berequested. If the conditions refer to both display and delivery, both anMDN and a DSN may be requested.

Unconditioned e-mail, are those e-mail that have no delivery conditionsassociated therewith. If there are no conditioned e-mail, process 200returns to step 202 via step 208. Otherwise, if in step 208 there areconditioned e-mail, this mail is queued in step 210, pendingsatisfaction of the conditions, as described in conjunction with steps212-218. Existing e-mail clients, such as Eudora include provisions forqueuing e-mail messages for later transmission; additionally, e-mailclients such as Microsoft® Outlook include mechanisms for saving draftsof sent e-mail.

In step 212, process 200 loops, watching for DSNs and MDNs with respectto the e-mail sent in step 206. Step 212 may parse incoming messages todetect fields in the DSNs and MDNs. (DSNs and MDNs may collectively bereferred to herein as “return receipts”.) For example, the MIME subtypefield in accordance with RFC2298 contains “disposition-notification” andthe disposition-field contains a disposition-type, one value of which,“displayed” reflects that the subject e-mail has been displayed by anMUA reading the recipient's mailbox. Note that fields in an MDNconforming to RFC2298 are defined according to the rules of RFC822.RFC822, is the Internet e-mail standard. RFC822-compliant-header parsersare available in programming languages such as Java and Perl, and may beadaptable for use to parse a MDN conforming to RFC2298. Additionally,with respect to DSNs publicly available “bounced message parsers” may beadapted to determine receipt of an e-mail message by the addressee. Onesuch parser is a regular expression based “bounced” mail parsers writtenin Perl for analyzing and reporting elements of RFC1894 DSN. This parseralso may be adapted for parsing MDNs. (Such Perl modules may be found atthe Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) which is a centralrepository for Perl software (www.cpan.org). Artisans of ordinary skillwould recognize that Perl is a scripting language particularly adaptedfor text processing and available across platforms.)

If, in step 212, a status notification is received, in step 214 it isdetermined if the conditions with respect to the conditioned e-mail aresatisfied. For example, if the condition required that a specifiedpercentage of the addressees of the e-mail sent in step 206 have openedthat e-mail, in step 214, process 200 would calculate the percentagebased upon a count of the number of delivery notifications received, andcompare that value with the required value. If the condition issatisfied, in step 216 the conditioned mail is sent to the nextrecipient of recipient group. Note that the content of the conditionedmail need not the same as the content of the mail upon which thedelivery of the mail in step 216 is conditioned. In other words, themessages may, or may not be the same. The conditions set for thedelivery of the e-mail to the next set of recipients, and thedetermination that the conditions have been satisfied does not depend onthe contents of the messages themselves. Of course, the rationale forconditioning the delivery of the e-mail may be predicated on thecontents of the messages. For example, the sensitive nature of thecontents may be the reason for conditioning the delivery of the e-mail.

Thus, in some circumstances, it may be desirable to control thedistribution of an e-mail message to selected recipients. For example,the e-mail message may include sensitive information that should bedistributed to and read by a particular set of recipients before beingdistributed more widely. Consider, within an enterprise, thedistribution of an e-mail announcement concerning organizational changeswithin the enterprise. It may be desirable to distribute theannouncement first to managers within the enterprise, then to employeesaffected by the changes and lastly to all employees. It may be furtherdesired to delay distribution to one or more of the categories ofrecipients based on the delivery status of prior recipients.

Another example may arise in distributing organizational informationWhen a second (that is, upper) line manager reads the note, the firstline managers (lower) are then sent the note. When a first line managerread the note his/her department would then get the note.

Another application of the present invention may be to coordinate tasksin a projects. For example, in a code development project if there areseveral defects that all need to be fixed before the next level of codeis built, then an email notification to the builders may beautomatically deferred until the developers responsible for thecorrective action received this email. Similarly, if a file has beenmodified by several different people and these modifications must beundone, an email may be sent asking each person to undo their change.However, rather than sending the note to everyone and making themcoordinate making the changes manually, the mail would be delivered toeach successive person that needs to undo modifications after eachperson reads the email reducing the need to manual coordinate themodifications.

Process 200 then returns to step 208, and continues to loop over steps208-218 until all conditioned mail has been sent. Note that theconditions set for each set of conditioned e-mail may be different. Ifno such mail remains, process 200 returns to step 202.

Returning to step 214, based on the message delivery notifications, thedelivery conditions have not been satisfied, in step 218, it isdetermined if the conditions are overridden. In other words, in step 218it is determined if the conditioned mail should be sent although theconditions are not satisfied. Step 218 may, for example, be performed bythe user's mail client (MUA) generating an dialog pane querying the userif he or she wants to send the conditioned mail although the conditionshave not yet been satisfied. The use of such dialogs to alert or queryusers would be understood by persons of ordinary skill in the art.Similarly, a textual query may be displayed to the user in a commandline interface based e-mail client. Note, that in an embodiment of thepresent invention, step 218 may be enabled via a deliveryoption/parameter specified by the user in step 204. If the conditionedmessages are to be sent anyway, step 218 proceeds by the “Yes” branch tostep 216. Otherwise, step 218 returns to step 212, and process 200continues to receive message delivery notifications pending satisfactionof the delivery conditions.

FIG. 3 illustrates an exemplary hardware configuration of dataprocessing system 300 in accordance with the subject invention. Thesystem in conjunction with the methodology illustrated in FIG. 2 may beused to provide controlled distribution of e-mail among selectedrecipients or groups of recipients. In particular system 300 may, in oneembodiment may provide operations performed in an e-mail client withrespect to receiving user input and setting e-mail delivery options inresponse thereto. In another embodiment system 300 may provideoperations in a mail client with respect to the receipt of messagedelivery notifications and determining if delivery conditions have beensatisfied. Data processing system 300 includes central processing unit(CPU) 310, such as a conventional microprocessor, and a number of otherunits interconnected via system bus 312. Data processing system 300 alsoincludes random access memory (RAM) 314, read only memory (ROM) 316 andinput/output (I/O) adapter 318 for connecting peripheral devices such asdisk units 320 to bus 312, user interface adapter 322 for connectingkeyboard 324, mouse 326, trackball 332 and/or other user interfacedevices such as a touch screen device (not shown) to bus 312. System 300also includes communication adapter 334 for connecting data processingsystem 300 to a data processing network, enabling the system tocommunicate with other systems, and display adapter 336 for connectingbus 312 to display device 338. CPU 310 may include other circuitry notshown herein, which will include circuitry commonly found within amicroprocessor, e.g. execution units, bus interface units, arithmeticlogic units, etc. CPU 310 may also reside on a single integratedcircuit.

Preferred implementations of the invention include implementations as acomputer system programmed to execute the method or methods describedherein, and as a computer program product. According to the computersystem implementation, sets of instructions for executing the method ormethods are resident in the random access memory 314 of one or morecomputer systems configured generally as described above. These sets ofinstructions, in conjunction with system components that execute themmay control the distribution of e-mail among recipients (or sets ofrecipients in accordance with user-specified criteria as describedhereinabove. Until required by the computer system, the set ofinstructions may be stored as a computer program product in anothercomputer memory, for example, in disk drive 320 (which may include aremovable memory such as an optical disk or floppy disk for eventual usein the disk drive 320). Further, the computer program product can alsobe stored at another computer and transmitted to the users work stationby a network or by an external network such as the Internet. One skilledin the art would appreciate that the physical storage of the sets ofinstructions physically changes the medium upon which is the stored sothat the medium carries computer readable information. The change may beelectrical, magnetic, chemical, biological, or some other physicalchange. While it is convenient to describe the invention in terms ofinstructions, symbols, characters, or the like, the reader shouldremember that all of these in similar terms should be associated withthe appropriate physical elements.

Note that the invention may describe terms such as comparing,validating, selecting, identifying, or other terms that could beassociated with a human operator. However, for at least a number of theoperations described herein which form part of at least one of theembodiments, no action by a human operator is desirable. The operationsdescribed are, in large part, machine operations processing electricalsignals to generate other electrical signals.

Although the present invention and its advantages have been described indetail, it should be understood that various changes, substitutions andalterations can be made herein without departing from the spirit andscope of the invention is defined by the appended claims.

1. A method for conditional delivery of e-mail comprising: transmittinga first e-mail message to a first group of individuals, wherein thefirst group of individuals are associated with a plurality of firstaddresses; receiving one or more return receipts, the return receiptscorresponding to a receipt status of said first e-mail message withrespect to corresponding ones of said plurality of first addresses;determining, in response to said return receipts, if a first preselectedset of conditions is satisfied, then a second e-mail message isdelivered to a second group of individuals associated with a pluralityof second addresses, wherein said first preselected set of conditionscomprises a receipt of said first e-mail message by a first specifiedfraction of said plurality of first addresses, wherein said firstpreselected set of conditions further comprises display of said firste-mail message by a second specified fraction of said plurality of firstaddresses, wherein said first group of individuals are different fromsaid second group of individuals.
 2. The method of claim 1 furthercomprising, if said first preselected set of conditions is satisfied,sending said second e-mail message to said one or more secondaddressees.
 3. The method of claim 1 further comprising queuing saidsecond e-mail message for delivery to said one or more secondaddressees.
 4. The method of claim 3 further comprising receiving saidfirst preselected set of conditions for delivery of said second e-mailmessage to one or more second addressees in response to user input. 5.The method of claim 4 further comprising determining if said firstpreselected set of conditions is overridden.
 6. The method of claim 2further comprising if, in response to one or more return receipts forsaid second e-mail message, a second preselected set of conditions fordelivery of a third message to one or more third addressees issatisfied, sending a third e-mail message to said one or more thirdaddressees.
 7. The method of claim 2 wherein a content of said seconde-mail message differs from a content of said first e-mail message.